The ad jingle goes, “my baloney has a first name, it’s O-S-C-A-R.” Hollywood is exactly the same way. Only their baloney is a lot harder to swallow. It’s filled with liberal propaganda and attacks on the American way of life.
On Sunday, March 7, the 82nd Oscar Awards will serve up a buffet of Hollywood’s twisted views of America. This year’s star is Director James Cameron’s eco-epic “Avatar,” which portrays both the U.S. military and industrialization as Titanic villains. The bow-and-arrow wielding Na’vi who live in harmony with their world are Hollywood’s latest reversal of cowboys and Indians. John Wayne is long gone and cowboys are Cameron’s new “Aliens.” It’s “Captain Planet” with better special effects to kill Americans.
In a speech at the recent CPAC gathering, my friend Ann McElhinney, producer/director of the movie “Not Evil Just Wrong” called on Cameron to “grow up.” The film, she said, was “unbelievable rubbish” and an “anti-American, anti-capitalist and anti-mining rant.”
In other words, typical Hollywood fare. Only, in Cameron’s case, he’s made a wildly successful, technologically adept piece of propaganda. Like Michael Moore with talent. He’s twisting the minds of the young and building his fortune simultaneously. At last count, boxofficemojo.com said the movie had cleared nearly $2.5 billion.
The eco-theme has been playing well for Oscar in recent years. Pixar’s green cartoon “Wall-E” won an Oscar for Best Animated Film in 2008. The movie was like the future as described by Al Gore, but with more animation and better acting. Earth had been devastated by over-population and over-development, so the people just left. Only a lonely robot was there to fix everything with his trusty cockroach sidekick.
The Goreacle’s “An Inconvenient Truth” won as Best Documentary in 2007. That was the dry, wonky version of the other two films I’ve already mentioned. Since then, some inconvenient untruths have gotten the film and Gore into hot water. But Hollywood still found a reason to celebrate. Melissa Etheridge’s song “I Need to Wake Up” also won for the same movie. I’m sure the entire academy rode home that night in their limos, secure that they were indeed helping Mother Earth.
Each year Oscar celebrates some obvious talking point of the American left. When it’s not worshipping Gaia, the Academy is promoting homosexuality. Last year’s typical liberal homage was fairly obvious – a film starring a California lefty and about a California gay lefty. “Milk,” about the life and death of San Francisco’s gay Mayor Harvey Milk, featured loony liberal Sean Penn in the lead role. It was one of those films that had O-S-C-A-R written all over it. It merged the left-wing push for the gay agenda and against Proposition 8 with one of Tinsel Town’s biggest liberal stars. Poor Frank Langella lost his Oscar bid to Penn because even the “Frost/Nixon” bash of the former Republican president wasn’t liberal enough to win.
The only way “Milk” could have missed out getting an Oscar was if it were competing against Obama himself. (The Awardee-in-Chief already has a Nobel Peace Prize and two Grammies for audiobooks of both “The Audacity of Hope” and “Dreams From My Father.”)
Gay movies are an easy path to Oscar victory. In 2006, Philip Seymour Hoffman won for playing gay writer Truman Capote in “Capote.” That same year, director Ang Lee won because he made a movie about gay cowboys called “Brokeback Mountain.” CBSNews.com’s Polly Leider was typical of the media in loving the film. She called it “the best movie of the year — daring, original, and one of the most artfully rendered love stories ever put on film.”
That was certainly was the Hollywood view. But gay cowboys had a lot of Academy competition in 2006. George Clooney and Rachel Weisz won Best Supporting awards for a pair of movies that bashed business. Clooney’s “Syriana” depicted the oil industry overthrowing governments and murdering people. In “The Constant Gardener,” pharmaceutical companies wore the black hats. But they were merely cozy with governments and, yes, they also murdered people. For all that Hollywood hopes to make a profit, the movie industry spends a lot of time attacking the industries that give us energy to live and drugs that help us stay that way.
Hollywood can’t have a big night any more without pushing the Left Coast agenda. It isn’t always big name awardees that reflect a political view. The anti-God, anti-Christian “Golden Compass” took home a Visual Effects Oscar in 2008. The Tommy Lee Jones anti-Iraq War movie “In the Valley of Elah” didn’t even win, but it was honored just by being there. In 2003, many in the audience even gave a standing ovation when child rapist Roman Polanski won Best Director for “The Pianist.”
Sometimes, good movies win. The pro-life “Juno” won and even one of the pro-Christian Narnia movies got an Oscar for make-up. But those are the exceptions that prove the rule. And on Oscar night, the Hollywood left most certainly rules.
As always, the Academy will claim it’s giving us a feast of film, only it isn’t. It’s not even baloney. It’s just the rest of the bull.
Dan Gainor is The Boone Pickens Fellow and the Media Research Center’s Vice President for Business and Culture. He is a frequent contributor to The Fox Forum. He can also be contacted on FaceBook and Twitter as dangainor.
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